


Edges

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 09:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10591620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: He was twenty-years-old when he lost everything, and only a few months older when he was given everything.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TauriLucisCaelum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TauriLucisCaelum/gifts).



> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/158561114762/hey-jasperraven-first-thank-you-for-captaining) for various requests.

He was twenty years old.

That age where the whole world starts to open up and share everything. He was out of high school and saving up for college; loading on odd hunts and jobs all across town during the day and steadily collecting paychecks from the bar at nights. Libertus right at his side. They were racing each other towards that one last payout that would set them at their tuition goals.

Nyx had always been eager to see Insomnia up close. There was a community college just within the city wall that was reasonable enough for their savings. When he drove up to the bluff at the edge of town on his nights off, he traced the road winding out of Galahd, deep into the plains and across the rivers beyond, until it reached the far whisper of Insomnia’s silhouette. He would imagine his truck bumping all the way along that road. Him and Libertus and Selena cranking up the radio and singing the whole way there.

When the shimmering Wall finally did spread out above his head, he was still twenty years old.

But the world had closed itself off from him behind the city gates. It left him with nothing. He was a stranger in the city of his dreams that quickly shaded into nightmares. He couldn’t land a job. No refugee could. Insomnia didn’t want them. Nyx wondered if the employment rejections were a collective effort to kill them all off like rats from a plague ship.

He and Libertus pooled together their tuition money to survive. Paid for an apartment that wasn’t worth the price of rent, but was as good as a refugee was going to get in this cut-throat city. At the end of the first month, Nyx went outside the budget and bought a case of beer. Drank through more than half of it when Libertus wasn’t home and sat, sick and crying, in the bathroom all night with an old picture of his family crumpled in his fist.

It was the last time he cried for home and the future he was never going to have.

He woke up the next morning on the bathroom floor with Libertus’s jacket over him. He staggered into the kitchen and found a cup of coffee waiting for him. Libertus slid him a piece of paper across the table.

“A guy came by the grill last night with a whole stack of these. Either we starve to death in this shit-hole, or we march to death for the King.”

They dropped off their enlistment forms the next day. Standing in line with what looked like a hundred Galahdian refugees. All skin and bones and sunken eyes, haunted eyes. All staring up at the Citadel like it bore the faces of the gods. The glaive was a grim salvation, trading poverty and prejudice for the pride of serving a country that had abandoned them to be slaughtered by Niflheim’s firing squads.

But it was all any of them could get. King Regis was the only man in all of Insomnia willing to give Galahdians anything. As far as masters went, you couldn’t do better than the King of Lucis.

Libertus had a lot of questions about the new faction they were signing away their lives to. He lingered to the side of the registration desk, chatting up the quiet Crownsguard woman about it well after he’d already passed the enlistment form to her companion. While he did, Nyx wandered.

He was still hung-over and horrible and he knew it. His people greeted him like they were old friends – some of them were – but all he could greet them back with was a glare. He was all bared teeth and soft snarls today, but even those barely had any strength to them. He toured aimlessly around the areas of the Citadel not walled off by Crownsguard, boots scuffing along the grounds and eyes cast down from the imposing figures stationed around him.

That was going to be him soon. Pressed into Lucian black. Collared by the King. Sending himself out to be killed for a people that would cheer his death rather than mourn his life.

He didn’t know if that was worth the prize of getting to kill a hundred Nifs every day.

He didn’t know if it was vengeance or peace that he wanted.

He didn’t know if he wanted to survive this anymore.

Nyx found his truck, dented and rusted red like the blood spilled in his village. It should have died at the refugee camp. They both should have. Lately, Nyx thought a lot about that bluff at the edge of town. Where he’d gone to cast his dreams out to the glittering skyline. And later, to watch them burn beneath the Nif air raids.

He thought about driving himself straight off of that cliff.

Something in the truck bed shifted then. As if to warn him not to drive off a cliff-side without making damn sure there wasn’t live cargo on board. There was a pair of raincoats tossed in the back, the heavy fabric settling from the slight rustle of movement. Nyx huffed out a sigh through his nose, not in the mood to deal with whatever the hell that was. An un-leashed pet? A rodent of some sort? (Of course not. The Citadel was far too sterile for vermin – wonder why they let him in, then.)

Nyx leaned over the side and jerked the hood back. He nearly yelped in fright like the child he found underneath. Wide, startled blue eyes stared up at him, shocked as still as a petrification spell. Or prey caught beneath the starving eye of a predator. Freezing to blend into the environment as if it hadn’t already been caught, and thereby dooming itself with its own broken self-preservation skills.

“Out,” Nyx ordered, tiredly breaking the kid’s stunned expression.

“Sorry,” the boy said, expression dropping into a dejected frown.

As he was about to climb out of the car, a pair of voices echoed from further down the garage. Nyx’s stowaway gasped and bunched back down, fisting the hood of Nyx’s coat back over his head. He peered up at him from where he hid, innocent and imploring. Nyx felt an entirely too sober pull from his hang-over towards that silent plea. It reminded him of the kids he had dug from the rubble at home, terrified and shivering beneath the ashes. Desperately hoping for safety from the man that found them, but fearing danger after the last hours had taught them that there was only danger left in Galahd.

Nyx pressed a hand to the back of the hood, gently nudging the boy’s head down. He leaned against the driver’s side door and watched the pair of fretting adults wander from car to car – “where could he be?”; “what game is he playing _now_?” Nyx hardly had to pretend to be a day-drunk fiddling with his keys. His skull still throbbed with the remnants of his sorrows, hands colder than they’d ever been since he’d come into this city. Tiny tremors seemed to perpetually be coursing through them. It served his act well enough now, fingers making the keys shake. But it was his bloodshot eyes that kept the searchers at a decent distance from his truck.

One thing he’d learned very fast about the Insomnians’ psychology: if you saw a problem, avoid it. The pair vanished as quickly as they had appeared, never once pausing to ask the only other man in the garage if he had seen a trouble-making child dart through. Nyx wrinkled his nose as their shadows dissipated at the exit. He might as well not have existed to them.

“Clear,” he grumbled at the raincoat.

The boy peeked out from beneath his hiding spot, head whipping back and forth from one end of the garage to the other. An audible “phew” whistled past his lips and he clamored out from beneath his cover.

“Thanks a bunch, mister!”

He was a gangly little squirt. Knobby limbs and baby skin. Expensive clothes and pampered hair. A bloodless Insomnian brat, white as snow and untouched by the cruelty of the world. If Nyx were a lesser man – and he thought for sure that today, he was – he would have resented the kid. Just for being what he was. Not Insomnian so much as _innocent._ Nyx envied him that. He envied that the clumsy scramble over the side of the truck looked to be the extent of his difficulties in life. He envied the look of utter commitment to this most menial of tasks, like this was the most important struggle in the entire world.

Nyx missed that. He missed that the biggest care in the world he’d ever had once had been to climb the biggest boulder in Galahd. And that the greatest injury he’d ever sustained was a scabbed knee from losing his footing and skidding the whole one foot back down to the ground.

His stowaway finally escaped the trial of his truck, landing on his feet and looking awfully proud of himself for it. He turned a bright, blue stare up at Nyx and smiled. Nyx shifted his head in a nod, but didn’t have the strength to smile back. The boy’s face slowly fell into a quizzical frown.

“Are you okay, sir?”

Nyx snorted at the “sir.” He imagined that was something he would be saying himself a lot from now on. _Yes, sir._ _I’ll be mauled by a daemon so you can keep throwing away all the food that refugees could use not to starve. Yes, sir. I’ll lay down my life so that Galahdian children can keep crying in your alleys because they can’t afford a home._

“Fine, kid,” he lied, voice like a gory gurgle. “Don’t jump into the backs of strange cars anymore, okay?”

The boy gave no indication of agreement, his plump, pink cheeks puffed in that curious pout. Nyx flipped between the whole two keys on his key-ring. One for the truck, rusty and coated in desert dust. One for the apartment, cold and gray and so broken down the middle, sometimes he couldn’t fit it into the lock. How appropriate.

“Are you a soldier?” the boy asked, suddenly.

“You psychic, kid?” he teased, dully.

The boy shook his head, shaggy dark hair fanning about his face. “The daggers,” he said, standing on his tip-toes as he leaned back over the side of the truck bed. “They’re yours?”

Nyx glanced at the bundled up blades in the corner of the bed. They were beginning to dull with disuse. Hadn’t shed the blood of beasts in a month. Nyx had hardly touched them since the invasion. Every time he had picked them up in the days immediately following it, they weighed like the entire world in his hands. They were too heavy with his guilt; at not wielding them fast enough to save his family.

“Not anymore,” Nyx heard himself say as he stared at them.

“Why not?”

The boy looked back at him with the pure unburdened openness of youth and Nyx’s prickly reserve towards the blades yielded completely. He couldn’t snap at a child to mind his own damn business. Especially not when he looked at him like that. Rejecting his questions would be like kicking a puppy. Nyx wasn’t a monster.

“They’re broken.”

“What? No, they’re not!” the boy laughed, reaching towards the blades.

That sobered Nyx up right quick. A volley of “no”s rolled past his lips and he lurched over to the kid, gently lifting him from beneath the arms off of his truck and setting him on the ground, standing between him and the route to the daggers.

“Don’t touch those, kid, you’re able to lose a finger.”

The boy crossed his arms and gave an indignant little pout. “Dad says I’m gonna learn how to use daggers like those one day, anyway.”

“Not this day.”

The boy whined and rolled his eyes. Nyx amazed himself when he felt his lips turn into a smile at that petulant look. It didn’t last very long. Came and went so quickly that the little boy missed it.

“Why do you say that they’re broken?” he asked, a little spark of defiance flashing in his eyes, challenging the man to argue with him that they weren’t.

Nyx must have had more than two feet on the runt, but he stared up at Nyx with all the inarguable spite of every emboldened ten-year-old. Nyx liked him… and liked that he was the first person in all of Insomnia that hadn’t cursed beneath his breath at him like being Galahdian meant being a leper. He felt around for the words to describe how he felt about his daggers, trying hard not to get lost in the memory of how they had failed him. Wouldn’t do to have a traumatic episode in front of a child.

“It’s not so much the blades themselves, I guess,” he said, struggling to look too long at the pair. Galahdian forged, both of them. The only thing his father had left him and Nyx had shamed the gift by failing to save the family he’d tasked Nyx with protecting. “I just don’t know how to use them anymore.”

The boy turned his head on its side. “What do you mean? Did you forget?”

“No, it’s um… I don’t know, kid,” he sighed, dragging a hand down the side of his face. “I used to be so connected to them that it was like they were a part of me. But now that connection’s just gone. Cut. It feels like I can’t reach them, even when they’re right there to pick up.”

Nyx was confounded when a loud, excited, “Oh, oh!” bubbled up from the kid. He bounced on the balls of his feet and scurried up to Nyx, grabbing onto his wrist. His smile broke over his face as bright and blinding as sunshine on the horizon.

“I get that!” he babbled. “Dad has that problem sometimes, but we know how to fix it! Here, I’ll help you ‘cause you helped me. This’ll make it aaaall better.”

Nyx stared down at the tiny hands wrapped around his. It looked wrong, felt wrong; those small, soft hands on one that had felt blood, broken bones, burned and beat and made a ruin of beasts and men. Feeling the strange, tingling warmth spread through his icy fingers was… not “wrong” per se. It was odd. Like nothing he had ever felt before. It was a clean feeling, light and airy, cutting gently through the tangles of grief and despair that were infecting deep inside of Nyx. Something bright started to glow at the backs of his eyes. Somehow the world was becoming a little clearer, the lines of the cars in the parking garage so much sharper. The feeling filled him and emptied him all at once, and when the strange rift of sensation subsided, it felt like it had settled into his very bones.

The child released him, beaming up at him and nodding at the daggers Nyx was barring him from. “There you go! Now try reaching for them.”

Nyx stared at him, still shocked by the strange sensation and confused by the certainty of his enthusiasm. He glanced at the daggers in the truck, and turned his hand towards them. He fully intended to just reach inside and take them by the hilt. He didn’t expect one of them to _jump_ into his open palm in a blast of violet-blue sparks. He yelped in surprise and dropped it back in the truck immediately.

The boy giggled.

And Nyx thought he was going to throw up.

Because there was only a specific few people in all the world that wielded this power. Nyx had just signed his life away to the one in charge not ten minutes ago.

Months later, it was a nightmare trying to explain to the King during the ritual to bond him to the Crystal that he, err… already was. Through his _son._ Regis had stared, bemused, as Nyx recited the whole story, apologizing profusely that he hadn’t come forward about it sooner.

The magic had been intoxicating. He’d been practicing with it on his own after the hours of physical training for the Kingsglaive. He was amazed when King Regis didn’t have his head for taking the power from his son. Instead, Regis just snorted in laughter and rolled his eyes. “Well, you’re just ahead of the curb then, aren’t you?”

Things changed after that day in the garage. The magic drove Nyx wild with delight. He felt like a kid again himself, warping through the slowly developing Galahdian district. He wondered if that was in small part due to the magic being from a child in the first place. He wondered if the way he felt using it had everything to do with the soul of the kid who gave it to him. Nyx finally felt powerful again. He felt _free_ again. Falling into the atmosphere, becoming one with the winds, feeling fire singing in his blood… He found something he’d lost in Galahd.

Noctis, he would learn was the Prince’s name. Noctis had re-shaped his purpose. Noctis had re-connected him to his swords, pointed his grief in the right direction; gave him one thing worth living for in this forsaken city. The first time Nyx used the magic on an MT battalion, clearing the roads for a terrified Leiden family to pass through, he finally knew that it was worth it to protect Insomnia. That every person he protected by keeping the daemons from the Wall, was one more person than he had protected in Galahd.

He had a Lucian kukri forged to swap into his set, keeping the first one that had jumped into his hand that day in the garage.

Ten years later, Nyx never would have imagined that he would love his job. That he would find the honor he’d lost at home in the Kingsglaive. That he would find solace in defending the futures of others to avenge the future he’d lost.

Ten years later, Nyx never would have imagined that scrappy brat from the garage would grow up into the beguiling creature that crawled into his bed every night.

He was thirty years old when he told Noctis he loved him.

When he said that he had saved his life in ways he could never fully explain to him.

Some things never changed. There were still people within Insomnia that wanted the Galahdians out. There were still people that were never grateful for the sacrifices the glaive endured to save them.

But then Nyx would come home. Open his apartment door. Have Noctis warp into him and laugh “surprise” against his lips. As bright and vibrant as the child he’d first met. And everything that belonged to Noctis, everything that Noctis loved, was worth protecting to Nyx.

And Noctis loved his kingdom. Even during the dark nights of screaming into Nyx’s shirt, saying that he hated everything, that he wanted to run away from this city, that he wanted his life to be different, he still loved his country.

Because Lucis was where the people he loved lived. It was where all the people that made Noctis happy lived. And ten years from the day everyone Nyx had loved died, he had people he loved in Lucis again, too.

His truck died a week after Noctis shared his power. Nyx tried to turn it on one day and it just choked. He never once thought about that cliff again after that. Instead he walked a straight path, his best friend at his side. And they walked straight into Crowe, into Pelna, into a family that they’d all lost.

Nyx walked straight back into Noctis. Recognized him by the flutter in his magic that told him the Prince’s heart was racing. He walked straight into his heart and Noctis climbed inside of his. And Nyx was finally home.

He was thirty years old.


End file.
